Not only do you contend with flies, there are roaches and other prowling vermin at Squat Toilet Ground Zero. Rats love a squat toilet. Home sweet home. They’re all too happy to sink a fang into you, and the rat carries plague fleas. Twenty-nine percent have rat fever. I mention this to impart a feel for the romance of travel in exotic climes. You hate it when it’s going on but years later you look back on the experience with fondness. Or so they say about Peace Corps gigs, etc.

Many of the girls in my exchange program are anorexic binge-purgers. Trying to match the prepubescent, rail-thin physique of the Chinese ideal damsel. Catch one puking and they cop the bad-water or food-poisoning defense when in fact bulimia is the more likely villain, especially among repeat offenders. My roommate, Elizabeth, is a puker and she barely tries to hide it. She will starve herself for days. She will live on air for eleven days and then comes the binge. By then her stomach has shrunk to the size of an English walnut, but on Day Eleven she starts pounding the food down. Day Eleven you come home and find everything in the cupboard scarfed, ingested, devoured, and done away with like Mother Hubbard’s bare cupboard and her faithful but starving Great Dane.

In the hotel room of Elizabeth’s alimentary track, checkout time is eleven A.M. “Huh-rooga!” she goes. “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! Huh-rarf!” You can hear her in the “ce suo” with a greenbottle fly providing a backbeat to her puke music. When Elizabeth plays the whale in the squat toilet I somehow feel compelled to wait and listen, like I’ve been paid to bear witness. I stand there and listen to see what comes next. Elizabeth actually believes that if she tapes up her thin-lipped cakehole and makes the magical 90-lb. mark, she’ll bag her Prince Charming. A handsome dog along the lines of Matt Damon, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal, or some combination thereof. If not one of them, and she’s feeling grandiose, she dreams of landing her very fave, Brad Pitt. Like that is so not going to happen, but when it comes to Brad Pitt, Elizabeth is in love.